In vehicles for transporting passengers there is a need to equip these with appropriate fittings.
A passenger airplane for example consists of a large number of components. Many of these components may be and are ordered by the respective airlines in a certain specification, modification or configuration, i.e. they are produced according to customer requirements. There is a standard airplane that is appropriately developed and approved. Aircraft ordered by a customer are always developed and approved with regard to the standard airplane. This occurs by tracking the amendments (modifications) to the standard airplane in order to represent the corresponding customer configuration.
Each airline has, in addition to certain wishes with regard to the interior fittings of the aircraft, requirements that are prescribed by the particular national aviation authorities. Above all, however, technical requirements with regard to flight mechanics, structural mechanics and vibration mechanics and connection requirements with regard to ventilation, hydraulics, electrics, etc. must be taken into account.
The provision of the respective differently configured components for final installation takes place within the context of so-called “realization engineering”. In this case the different configurations or specifications that are required by the airline are recorded.
On the basis of this recorded specification material, construction documents are then prepared, such as for example construction plans, parts lists and other documentation necessary for equipping a cabin of an aircraft. Due to the immense range of possible combinations this pre-engineering step is time-consuming and expensive. Thus there is a need in the aircraft industry for development to be configured more efficiently by targeted module-orientated pre-engineering and, based thereon, production of suitable assemblies for the airplane.
Furthermore, for example, an airplane cabin usually has connections, the position of these connections being fixed for example on the basis of safety rules. It is therefore necessary for the components with which the aircraft cabin is to be equipped to be disposed in the aircraft cabin in such a way that the connections of the aircraft cabin can be connected to the corresponding connections on the components.
Furthermore it is necessary for space in an airplane cabin to be utilized efficiently, so that the greatest possible number of passengers can be transported, thereby in particular reducing the fuel consumption per passenger.
For this purpose proposed solutions are already known in the prior art. Thus DE 100 41 031 A1 discloses a method for configuration of component arrangements, i.e. for definition of the spatial arrangement of components relative to one another and for optimization thereof with regard to position and/or amount, preferably in an airplane. In order to configure the arrangement of the components automatically and in order, if appropriate, to create production documents automatically by means of a data processing program, it is provided that the airplane type on which the construction documents are based is input into a configuration tool of a data processing system, that the airplane-specific geometry is stored in a drawing module of the data processing system stored and is automatically loaded therefrom and displayed, that in a functional and data analysis the necessary geometric objects or components are determined and described mathematically, position rules are mapped mathematically and stored and added to the airplane-specific geometry in the drawing module of the data processing system, and that in the configuration tool of the data processing system the objects or components together with the airplane-specific geometry are automatically optimally configured spatially relative to one another according to a defined set of rules taking account of the customer requirements. However, a disadvantage of this is that a calculation with regard to the configuration of the components in the airplane cabin must be performed for the entire airplane cabin, which makes the calculation time-consuming and requires considerable computing power.